


Legendary Shipping

by silveradept



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 14:17:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18551476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveradept/pseuds/silveradept
Summary: They used to be scared of her. She thought she might be able to make them scared again. But the people of this era are less easily scared. Instead, they seemed fascinated to hear about things that would have frightened them.





	Legendary Shipping

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ilthit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilthit/gifts).



She sat at the computer, tapping in the library card number and PIN, then clicking through the terms of service, waiting for the desktop to fully load and provide a connection to the Internet.

The first thing she did was load a search engine. The second thing she did was type in her own name. Not the one on the card, but the one that hadn't been seen in a book on a library shelves for centuries. 

Call it vanity, if you like, but she had heard from the librarians that people on the Web had such niche interests that if something existed in the world, someone, somewhere, had a website devoted specifically to that thing.

As it turned out, the librarians were right.

And not only was there a web page, they had _discussion forums_. Mostly full of people sharing stories they had heard about her from some other source a long, long time ago. Or from those children's story book adaptations of those stories, which seemed more interested in making her an old woman with eccentric habits rather than a terrifying force.

Of course, the days of terrifying them had long since passed. Most humans did enough terrifying of each other that they no longer really thought that much about what could come out of the darkness. Under the bed and inside the closet were no longer the scariest thing to a child. Their monsters seemed much more centered in other people.

Registering for an account was fairly easily, although she first had to create an e-mail account. She left a comment in one of the threads about some of the more egregious adaptations telling them what they got wrong and went back to the search results.

The scattered legend pages didn't give her any more information. The wikis were kind of boring in their attempt to be comprehensive. On the second page, she saw something intriguing and clicked through to that.

Sometime was writing a _new_ story about her. 

And, apparently, she had a romantic partnership with another inhabitant of the void. They were nice enough, she mused, but she had never known them to have any interest in partnering with anyone else. Perhaps the next time they were nearby, she would show them this story and they would have a laugh together.

Then they were apparently having sex, using his feeling appendages instead of, presumably, the organs that she would have expected him to have. That made the whole thing that much more amusing, although she suspected that an audience that didn't know them better would have found it very exciting, all that prehensile appendage action, thrusting and squeezing and otherwise making it quite the production of groans and vocalizations.

She wanted to register for this site, but it needed an invitation.

The work said that it was part of a series, so she clicked through to the next one. Her friend appeared again, but this time apparently seemed extremely interested in using whatever appendage they could to have sex with women...who apparently couldn't get enough of it. She clicked back to the previous one without finishing it.

The session timer on her computer grabbed her attention to tell her she would soon be signed off. Another day, perhaps, she would be able to finish reading about her supposed exploits.

It took three days for the invitation to arrive, by which time she had read more of the author's work. She certainly seemed very interested in the sex lives of the gods and horrors beyond human perception, even if she didn't get the details all that correct.

> Hello,
> 
> I enjoyed reading your story. It is quite nice to see people keeping old legends alive. I thought your portrayal of the sex was interesting, but I believe that the character in question isn't particularly interested in anyone, and that his method of reproduction has more to do with spore distribution than genital insemination. 
> 
> I was charmed and entertained by this piece, and I look forward to seeing more work from you.

The reply was a lot faster than she had expected.

> Thanks for the comment! Glad you enjoyed reading it.
> 
> It sounds like you've got some neat ideas for other stories to write. I'd love to see your take on the characters in your own story. We could all use more stories in this fandom.
> 
> Have fun!

She wasn't sure if it was a polite dismissal or an invitation, but it certainly sounded intriguing. Accurate stories might produce more people keeping their memories alive. Maybe even then, they could restore some of their former terror.

She wrote up the story of how she befriended that void creature and learned they didn't really have an interest in reproduction with just about anything and posted it.

The same person that had replied to her comment left her one fairly quickly.

> Oh, what a charming slice-of-life and coming out story! You make the characters real and vivid, like I already know them as friends and am listening to them talk in their living room.

If that was what the reader wanted to take from the story, instead of the understanding that nothing could save them from the time when they returned to pass judgment on humanity, then who was she to say otherwise? Humans would learn the truth soon enough.

Then came the second comment.

> Yay! I was hoping for someone to write something that wasn't tentacle porn, and that we get an ace character is even better.
> 
> I'm so glad it got rec'd. I never would have found this with the tags or the summary that it had.

The third contained a significant amount of gibberish typing, such that she seemed certain it had been written by a cat, except that it ended with one very clear request.

> More, please.

More? It had been an attempt to correct the record. The conversation itself had been nothing strange or out of the ordinary. Were these, perhaps, the first followers of a new cult? Cults were fun for the first few years, but then they started doing things like making sacrifices and trying to convert others and demanding that you show up at all of their meetings so that others could be exposed to the glory of their new god. It became, well, tedious. Often because it was more difficult to get what you wanted out of them when they were cultists, because then they started believing they knew what you wanted, even when you were telling them that what they were doing wasn't what you wanted.

Cults were more trouble than they were worth. She would warn her friend the next time they talked about it, so that they knew to brace themselves for another round of shouting and attempted summoning and altogether strange things done in "service" to them.

Still, if they wanted more of the deep philosophical conversations they engaged in regularly over a beverage and a stroll, far be it from her not to indulge these truth-seekers. She wrote up one of their long-standing debates about methodology of inducing terror into human brains and posted it for them to see.

By the morning, there were ten comments posted.

> Oh, wow. Based on your first work, I was expecting fluff, but this is creepy. Some extra tags would definitely help here.
>
>> It reads more like a discussion of business than of torture and pain. Makes a great analogue for what's going on these days.

> Are they flirting? This seems a lot like the prelude into some sort of hot void-on-void action.
>
>> Read the previous work in the series. One's ace and the other's not attracted to them.

> Wow, this is dark. This wouldn't be out of place on one of those creepypasta sites or on the site that says it's the database of weird objects that always seem to kill or maim anything they come across.
> 
> I am completely down for more of this.

She still didn't understand their craving for more. Cultists were really the only people she had met to this point who reveled in the dark and tried to get as much of it as they could. Everyone else had sensibly stayed away from the dark and her monsters. These ones seemed more than eager to get their fill of things that should properly give them nightmares. They sought the truth even when it should have sent them screaming in any other direction. It was supposed to be fun and a little scary to show them these bits and pieces, but all the comments seemed determined to devour every word and ask for more.

A void-creature had to keep her secrets, after all, or there wouldn't be any mystery left. There were a couple other residents she had been curious about, but never had introduced herself too. They would be the perfect creatures to write something patently absurd about. Maybe, since the audience of this site seemed insatiable about the supposed sex and romance lives of them, she could write up something like their interest in each other and fill it with as much lurid and purple prose as possible. Confronted with such obvious lies, they would hopefully lose interest and disband their cult before becoming too disappointed in their life choices.

By the next morning, there were twenty comments on the story.

> Oh. My. God. This is _hot_. This is going on my rec list. Hope you like lots of attention!

> I was fanning myself halfway through this piece, and I had to open the window to let all the steam out, even though it's -20 outside! Please tell me there's going to be more of this. I'm going to recommend it to everyone.

> More, more, more! I want more of this. There's so much heat here you could set something on fire with this fic.

It became clear that her intended result was not going to happen. At all. They seemed to be enjoying this entirely fictional account far more than anything else. She was in over her head. The humans of this era were mystifying to her. She needed help.

She mentioned what she had been doing to the void-creature she had written her first account at, and asked for their help. She certainly didn't expect them to laugh. A booming, genuine, seemingly well-needed and long-lasting mirthful laugh that echoed throughout their chambers.

"Oh, my," they said. "That is one of the funnier stories of our long existences. You have done quite well for yourself in this era." 

"I don't understand," she said. "Why do they not flee in terror when exposed to the truths of our existences?"

"Because," they said, still laughing in between their words. "they think you have been writing fiction from the start. The place where you put your writings and have tried to convince them of your reality is a place where they write and post fiction regularly. You have the benefit of knowing void-creatures, so they think that your stories are especially good, rather than poor human imitations." 

Fiction? They thought she was writing fiction the whole time? That made a certain amount of sense. And explained why the thing that was actual fiction seemed to have produced the best results.

Perhaps she should change tactics. Followers were followers, no matter how you collected them, and if they believed all of it was fiction, she wouldn't have to deal with all of the headaches that came with cultists. It seemed to lack downsides.

The next day, she saw a new comment on her story.

> Blech. I'm sure all of you perverts find this ship wonderful, but if you want something that's _actually_ good, you should be following a more wholesome ship than this.

Perhaps it wouldn't be as different from cultists as she had thought.


End file.
